Robert Paxton discusses Alexis de Tocqueville in the opening paragraphs of the course reader The Anatomy of Fascism and his travels to America in 1831. Paxton reveals Tocqueville’s disillusion of America’s majority rule in a democracy and its ability to impose conformity by social pressure. Tocqueville states “The kind of oppression with which democratic peoples are threatened will resemble nothing that had preceded it in the world”. While social pressure and conformity may not be the worst pressures upon us in a realm of totalitarianism and dictators, but Tocqueville still has a point. Psychological experiments have shown that individuals will give in to social pressure at nearly the drop of a hat, calling into question the validity of democracy.
A social psychology experiment in which psychologist S. Asch studied conformity in unambiguous situations, where confederates (working for the psychologist but appear to be volunteers) all agreed on an obviously false statement. For example, volunteers were given line X, after 3 further lines were presented to the participants. From the three lines presented they had to chose the one that was identical to line X . The ‘trick’ was that the answer was obvious, with a control group (when all confederates gave different answers) only 0.7% getting the wrong answer. When all confederates gave a unanimous vote towards an obviously wrong line choice, the percentage of real participant giving the wrong answer rose to 37%. However a shocking percentage is displayed when only one of the confederates gives the correct answer causing a display of ‘support’ for the real participant, the percentage of conformity with a wrong answer drops too 5.5%. When you place the findings of this experiment into the context of social groups, communities, or even societies the results can be detrimental to the whole notion of democracy. If individuals feel they are unable to answer a blatantly simple question because of social pressure then how are their political views going to fair. If people don’t feel they are able to express their political ideas due to any cause in leaves democracy redundant in the sense that it is not representational of the ideas and values held within a nation. This is perhaps why ideas on the fringe are unable to move into the mainstream, and hegemonic ideas remain the dominant force in society.
I think there is quite a difference between this experiment and expressing political views. Firstly, people in the experiment had to share their answers alloud, whereas in a voting situation, votes are private so are perhaps more likely to express people's actual views. Secondly, people might be more honest when the consequences of not expressing their real views have a direct impact on their way of life. I think people are definately influenced by people around them, and discouraged from acting overtly in a way that goes against norms of a society, but at least when it comes to voting, I think people can be pretty honest without fear of social repercussions
ReplyDelete